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American Family Association asks 'should poofs be allowed to marry?'

19:19 / 19.12.03

Not quite like that, obviously, but 'America's Pro-Family Online Activism Organisation' is currently running a poll that they intend presenting to Congress. It's seemingly been bounced around various gay.com type forums, and the pros and antis are now neck-and-neck.

I think it's only possible to take part if one is based in the US - but American posters, whatever their opinion, might wish to register their vote.

20:02 / 19.12.03

this has been popping around lj. after I voted, I saw the results, but it doesn't seem to offer a link to the updated results anywhere. does someone else see it? I'd be interested in seeing if the "yays" have gained any ground since I voted

The Apple-Picker

22:44 / 19.12.03

BK, when I just voted the results were something like 50.something percent for legalized marriage, 8.something percent for "civil union" with benefits of marriage, and the other 40-something percent was against legalized marriage.

01:28 / 20.12.03

Here's how it looked a few minutes ago when I faked a US zip code (Virginia 22222) to get my vote in...

01:33 / 20.12.03

Other handy US zip codes, courtesy of our friends at Cross+Flame:

22222 is Arlington, Virginia;
44444 is Newton Falls, OH;
55555 is Young America, MN
12345 is Schenectady, New York.

It was never gonna be representative. I'll be interested, however, to see how the AFA react if it's non-representative in the direction they didn't want.

02:46 / 20.12.03

I love the AFA. I've been on their mailing list for probably over three years now, and it's comedy gold with 'Action Alerts' like:

"Verizon backs vicious assault against God" (translation: they aired a commercial during King of the Hill)

"YWCA hires lesbian feminist as leader"

...those Wildmon brothers seem to be obsessed with porn to an unhealthy degree though. There must be more pressing threats to America's Morality than whether 7-11 sells Playboy...

gotham island fae

03:02 / 20.12.03

Earlier this evening it was 42% Nae, 50% YaeMarriage, 8% YaeIfitscalledCivilUnion. Then I tried to go to the main site to see who was counting and there was trouble bringing it up. Funny.

The bit I caught was enlightening, tho. I see why itz HI-larious, Baz.

05:02 / 20.12.03

Ah! I just remembered their best bit! A few years ago, they actually had 'anti-Marilyn Manson Action Kits' with instructions on what to do if he came to your town!

Red Cross Iodized Salt

07:30 / 20.12.03

A friend emailed a link to this poll to about 60 people on Wednesday. I think it was over 97% opposed to gay marriage at the time. Of course, they will now say that their poll was hijacked by godless homosexuals and their liberal-communist supporters. Had they just gotten votes from their core constituency the poll would have been championed as proof that everyone in the world agrees with them.

Still, its kind of gratifying to know that they didn't get what they wanted.

Red Cross Iodized Salt

07:39 / 20.12.03

Here are some NYC zip codes for anyone who wants to vote.

clicky

13:27 / 20.12.03

Hooray for the HomoLiberal World Agenda!

13:35 / 20.12.03

I oppose legalization of homosexual marriage and "civil unions" 39.41%
(162234 votes)

I favor legalization of homosexual marriage 52.24%
(215034 votes)

I favor a "civil union" with the full benefits of marriage except for the name 8.35%
(34374 votes)

yay! when I first did it, the bar graph showing "in favor of legalization" was only a tiny, tiny little squidge. we win, we win!

14:05 / 20.12.03

Yeah, I know this poll is probly skewed as hell by this point: but I just want to say how glad I am that the "civil uniuon" shuck is drawing only single-digit support. On a polarizing issue like this, there's a human tendency for fair-minded wafflers to try to split the difference, to compromise.

But there can be no compromise on this issue: the "call it anything but marriage" camp are advocating a new Jim Crow, a sexual apartheid. All or nothing, folks.

14:22 / 20.12.03

I think the 'civil union' thing is more of an attempt (by the more secular among us) to separate the State part from the Church part; I don't see it as waffle or compromise. Personally speaking, I don't want to get married; I just want access to halfway-similar legal rights.

15:05 / 20.12.03

I think I take a part from both Jack Fear and Ganesh here. I don't want to see a 'civil union' compromise. However, I feel it is a compromise not because it imposes segregation through two types of union but because it conflates the issues of gay rights and the separation of church and state. I voted for marriage because equality of terms implies equality of function, and the step to separate the term 'marriage' from the legal implications of union is one I would like to see taken on its own merit, without reference to gay rights. Did I repeat myself?

gotham island fae

18:15 / 20.12.03

Jack Fear using perhaps overharsh wordz to describe something? Has Barbelith gone mad?

I hear the equality of terms voice, lumino city, and see the defense of a right to legal partnership benefits common in society, Ganesh.

Che Queervara with Fist in Air.

20:16 / 20.12.03

I think it depends how one frames one's vote. If I were more inclined toward a particular religion, I might be keener on being afforded fully 'marriage' equality.

20:37 / 20.12.03

The argument is not about sacramental marriage, 'nesh--obviously that's a matter for individual denominations, and it's not the US government's fight precisely because of the separation of church & state.

But marriage is a legal state, as well as a sacred one--hets can go to a Justice of the Peace and get married without ever stepping foot inside a church; and some denominations will recognize such legal marriages as valid & binding, and some denominations won't.

How does that differ from "civil unions"? And if they're the same thing, what purpose does it serve to have two terms for it--unless it is to exclude out gay brothers and sisters from something hets can take for granted?

21:03 / 20.12.03

I think the difficulty lies in the term 'marriage', Jack. While you (and I) can readily conceive of a marriage in purely legal terms, I'm aware that many - perhaps even a majority within the US? - mentally add a religious/spiritual dimension, referring back to that ultimate authority, the Bible.

If the question were reframed so that one were clear that the term 'marriage' referred to non-sacramental unions then, yes, I'd concede that a non-sacramental marriage is essentially identical to a civil union. While the terminology remains a source of potential obfuscation, I prefer the latter.

23:28 / 20.12.03

Mneh. I would disagree, quite frankly: I think the vast majority of people are capable of distinguishing between legal marriage and "a church wedding" (if anything particularly here in the US, where the separation of Church and State is a Big Fucking Deal--paradoxically, because so many Americans are overtly religious, they are acutely aware of living, as it were, in two worlds, and by two sets of laws--one of which expects more of them than the other).

Do you disagree with my thesis, then--that having a separate term for legally-codified gay and lesbian monogamous domestic partnerships sends a message that those partnerships are somehow... less... than straight marriages? Less valid, less dedicated to the principles of love-honor-cherish-obey sickness/health richer/poorer (all requirements of legal/civil marriage as well as church marriage, BTW)?

00:09 / 21.12.03

I voted to support the proposal to extend access to 'civil' marriage for homosexuals (although no one has mentioned transexuals, transgender people, inter-sex or other people who use different labels). I support the notion that equality of terms implies equality of rights. I do not think that this poll is of any intrinsic value. I didn't want to think that right-wing newspapers would be able to report such a poll to bash gay people. I chose Ohio as my state as it seemed the most rural and possibly most reactionary state, just so they couldnt claim it was the New York, homosexual, jewish communists that had skewed the result.

Whilst in Great Britain, a bill to extend legal rights to aforementioned transexual and transgender people received its second reading in the House of Lords, which sounds encouraging, although i don't know the detail.

Also what provision will be made to allow gay 'menage a trois' sp? to have a three-way marriage? If we are dispensing with tradition in general why adopt heterosexual paradigms?

16:49 / 21.12.03

One baby step at a time....

One of the things I'd love to see (and proposed to my sister, who went Catholic about 9 years ago) would be to reserve the term marriage for church-approved unions, and have civil unions stand in for the legal aspects of "marriage" as the term is currently used - take some "rights" away from the heterosexuals for a change, as it were...

She was a little surprised, kind of liked the idea, but had to think on it some more and never got back to me with her considerations. It solves a couple of problems, creates a potential can-o-worms in that each church gets to validate the unions of its congregation and each church may or may not recognise the unions of other congregations as valid (already the case for some orthodox churches, although most folks don't realize that).

What do you all think??

16:51 / 21.12.03

And, yes, I went and voted in favor of "queer marriage"...

19:48 / 21.12.03

Agreeing to disagree with you, then, Mr Fear.

ONLY NICE THINGS

21:52 / 21.12.03

Well, hoom. I'm not entirely sure that the terminology is the issue. Jack Fear, I think, is reading the poll in a manner it is not designed for, by assuming that "marriage" includes the legal and the religious process, and that "civil union" is another matter, whereas logically, if certain religions will accept a legal marriage as binding and others will not, the legal marriage *is* a civil union. I don't see why it should be all or nothing, or for that matter *how* it could be all or nothing, since I imagine many *churches* will not recognise the civil union of two gay men or lesbians as binding either.

Which leaves a legal ceremony that entitles, say, Ganesh's partner to be recognised as his default next of kin, entitle them to the same tax level as a (legally, rather than say in secret by a religious group) married couple, and so on. Whether this is called "marriage" or not seems to be a fairly minor issue, if we are already saying that marriage covers both legal and non-legal unions. Presukably one could call one's partner one's spouse after a civil union, or one's husband or wife, if one really wanted to.

Looked at from another angle, maybe a distinct term form marriage would be useful to demonstrate that the couples in question do not want to be like straight couples - they just want to get the same treatment from the state and their employers regarding their partners. In that case, why would you want to be married? Straight people get married, and have been jealously guarding the concept for themselves for some time now. Why not instead create a status that provides the same guarantees but without the semiology, and allow the (non-legal, so personal and/or religious) attitude of the partners involved to decide how they refer to the event, the status and each other.

A

03:18 / 25.12.03

When you get down to it, "marriage" is a pretty nebulous term. For example, I'm currently legally "married", but, seeing as we split up nearly 2 years ago, I certainly don't feel, or act, like I'm married. It's just that we haven't gotten around to filing the appropriate paperwork yet.

In any event, I don't think that this is a question of what people might want, but what people are legally entitled to. It's pretty fucking stupid to argue that same-sex couples shouldn't enjoy the same legal rights/responsibilities as male/female couples do if they decide to get married, simply because marriage is traditionally some religious ritual involving a man and a woman. Many, if not most same-sex marriages (including mine) these days have little or nothing to do with religious tradition, so it seems odd to still define marriage in terms of often-homophobic religious standards.

Basically, if a godless heathen like myself can choose to become legally married to a woman and have that decision supported by the state, then why shouldn't another godless heathen be able to choose to marry someone of the same sex and have that decision supported by the state.

Perhaps there should be some sort of "civic-union" state in between legal marriage and non-marriage, but that's really a separate issue, and it should have nothing to do with what sexes the parties involved are.

....anyway, when i voted, the figures were 32.39% for the bigots, 8.27% for the fence-sitters and 59.34% for the rest of us.

Years of TV viewing have taught me that 90210 is a zipcode in California, so that's what I used.

02:00 / 06.01.04

I just received an AFA email update. As of this post, the results were...

1) I oppose legalization of homosexual marriage and "civil unions" 32.58%
(252149 votes)

2) I favor legalization of homosexual marriage 59.48%
(460369 votes)

3)I favor a "civil union" with the full benefits of marriage except for the name 7.94%
(61490 votes)

...although they sent me a warning that "Only votes that have a valid email address associated with them will be counted. We will be purging those with invalid email addresses, which may cause poll results to change somewhat." Not to be too cynical, but I can assume what result those odd Wildmon Brothers will end up with...

15:58 / 01.02.04

Just for the record, the links to the poll and its result all re-direct you to the AFA main page now... and the poll is nowhere to be found on their websit as far as I can tell... oops. That damn Homosexual Agenda...

16:42 / 01.02.04

I'll never understand how an organization can be an advocacy group for 'family values' or a vanguard of 'the American family' when that field of vision for what 'family' is is limited to white hetero Christian parents and their 2.5 children. Others need not apply.

Asinine.

16:44 / 01.02.04

those homos just MADE us beat them up. the best part is the quotation usage. "tolerance", "diversity". what funny, foreign words these "gays" have.

I also like how rosie o'donnell is said to have given it all up to the alter of homosexuality. you make it sound so KINKY, you pervy pervy fundies, no wonder all the kids are trying it these days.

21:21 / 01.02.04

Also them gays use 'provocative' behaviour infront of jocks and other fine upstanding pillars of the community, behaviour like 'being themselves' and 'public displays of affection', this causes jocks to bash them!!! Isn't it obvious? ??!??!??